‘HILLMEN’ IS A WORD I REMEMBER THINKING ABOUT LONG and hard. Sometimes when I’m blocking out a song, I just sort of hear a word and I think, ‘Well, that doesn’t mean anything,’ and I keep trying to change it but it just keeps coming back, and in the end I go, ‘Oh, sod it, it doesn’t matter. It fits. I don’t know what it means.’ This ‘hillmen’ is a case in point. I’ve no idea where it came from.

I remember having a lot of fun thinking about tribesmen, and I’m calling them ‘hillmen’; I’m getting a bit Neanderthal here, even a bit Viking. I’ve become a sucker for Egyptology and the study of ancient civilisations, and I do read a lot about that and watch a lot of it on TV, so the idea of creating my own tribe and my own ancient civilisation must have appealed to me.

Next thing you know, it cross-fades into a love song. I’ve just created a big tribal picture and then thrown in that little line that just trips it up: ‘. . . don’t worry / Your pretty little head’, which was very modern and very eighties, but actually quite a contrast to the rest of the song. I’m sure the Vikings would have had an equivalent term.

I suppose that is what different civilisations are about; all of this palaver – the Chinese palaver, American palaver, British palaver, South American palaver – is just to make sure that we’re taken care of. It’s to protect us. In a way, civilisation exists so that we don’t have to worry our ‘pretty little heads’. In itself, that simple reason for existence is not without its dangers, of course.

I may be looking for a tribe that doesn’t exist anymore. It’s just a fanciful tribe, and I enjoy creating my own history for them. It’s getting a bit spiritual, like the Aztecs, but definitely Northern Hemisphere. How do I see them? Sort of Viking-like, but without the helmets. They’re fording the mighty river flows and looking at the stars, and they’re trading goods. So in that respect, I’m making up my own Vikings and ferrying them over to Britain.

Hog Hill Mill, Sussex, 1984

‘Living in the higher reaches’. What I’m thinking about is the higher reaches of spirituality, but higher can also be interpreted as taking the higher road. The moral high ground. Or looking at it another way, it could be a druggie thing. It’s fanciful, but one thing I’ve discovered, going through all of my lyrics, is that I’ve got quite a broad style and I’ll allow myself almost anything – including the techno feel of this song, techno being very big at the time.